Sweetlands Found among Nova Scotia, Canada Immigrants
By Anne Kirby Salem, Oregon.
As I researched Sweetlands, Swetlands and Sweedlands recently in the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, I came upon a reference to the book, Nova Scotia Immigrants to1867 by Leonard and Norma Smith.
In this book I discovered that two daughters of my 4th great-grandparents, John Sweetland (born 1718), and Elizabeth Grant (born 1715), had emigrated from Marblehead, Massachusetts to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia in 1766. The Yarmouth fishing port is located on the Gulf of Maine in rural southwestern Nova Scotia, Canada. In the Immigrant book, the sisters’ maiden surnames are spelled “Sweedland” even though Marblehead records spell it “Sweetland.”
The oldest daughter, Mary Sweedland Trefry (b. 1737), came with her husband, John Trefry, and their two daughters Sarah and Mary. Her younger sister, Sarah Sweetland (b. 1745), arrived with her husband, Moses Hooper the same year they were married and the same year as their other Marblehead relatives came, on or before 1766. All in this group were in their early twenties to early thirties. John Trefry’s younger brother, Joshua Pitman Trefry, also came to Nova Scotia in 1766 along with his wife Mary Allen. So why did Sweetlands come?
I found that they were among immigrants called “New England Planters”. Massachusetts had a “population glut” in those days. The Sweetland group had responded to invitations by the lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, Charles Lawrence, to settle the more attractive lands and farms left vacant from the Bay of Fundy Campaign (1755) of the French Acadian expulsion. About 8,000 people in about 2,000 families, largely farmers and fishermen, arrived from 1759 to 1768 to take up the offer. Most of the fishermen went to the South Shore of Nova Scotia, where they got the same amount of land as the farmers did—a maximum of 1,000 acres of land with no rent for the first ten years. Many fishermen especially wanted to move there because they were already fishing off the Nova Scotia coast. Even though our Sweetlands were from the fishing town of Marblehead and settled the small fishing town of Yarmouth, they were still termed New England Planters. The Planters laid the foundations of a large number of the present day communities of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. They were called "Bluenosers" to distinguish them from the Loyalists who came after the American Revolution.
These Sweetland relatives came to Yarmouth, population 100, most likely by boat, just five years after Yarmouth was founded. The population swelled with the 8,000 Massachusetts immigrants. They affected the culture and language of the area since they were the first major group of English-speaking immigrants in Canada who did not come directly from Great Britain. Most of the New England Planters were Protestant Congregationalists. Today the town of over 6,000 residents is located in the heart of the largest lobster fishing grounds in the world.